Abstract

It is my thesis that Paul Tillich's insights have been neglected by scholars within the STS community which has been investigating relationships among science, technology, and society for over twenty years. This maturing STS enterprise needs to adapt both the method and the concept developed by Tillich who singularly understood our technological age through his own investigation of science, technology, and society. Tillich is widely known as the foremost theologian of culture in this century, and should be as widely known as an important philosopher of technical culture. ;Tillich's method and profound conceptual framework were developed to enable education in technical culture, in technological society, and in techno-scientific civilization. His method of correlation relates reciprocally the existential questions of modernity with the theological answers of Christianity. It is my thesis that this method is adaptable for relating the questions and answers which form the core of STS education. His conceptual framework of the dimensional unity of life integrates ontologically the inorganic, organic, psychological, spiritual, and historical dimensions of being. I contend that this framework is adaptable to integrate epistemologically the various levels within human intellect such as symbol, fact, data, information, knowledge, and understanding. ;The central telos of Tillich was "humanization" in the age of technology. He struggled toward this telos amidst global wars in which technology was deemed most "successful" when reducing humanity to inhumanity. The STS enterprise also aims toward "humanization" within technological Western Society where reductionism of a different sort is at work. Tillich is very important for the STS enterprise in analyzing this reductionism which is very complex since it involves reason, knowledge, ethics, and ideology. His systematic treatment offers insights toward the wholism which STS education attempts to promote. ;One dare not dismiss the work of Paul Tillich as inapplicable to public education because of its theological content. His system uses theology to enrich its philosophy of ontology which is very important for understanding where the student is, and to where STS education leads him/her. Modern technology, Tillichian thought, and STS education are integrated in this thesis